Images derived from scanned documents often include artifacts such as streaks, blotches resulting from defects in the original document such as punch-holes, tears, stains etc. and/or resulting from scanner defects, debris, and the like. For a small scan job, these artifacts can be removed in a manual digital image enhancement operation on a pixel-by-pixel basis using widely available image processing software having an “erase” feature. This manual pixel-by-pixel based artifact removal method is not realistic in terms of time and cost for large, multi-page scan jobs commonly encountered in commercial, legal, academic, and other real-world environments.
Automated artifact removal methods have been proposed but have not been found to be satisfactory in terms of quality assurance. In these automated systems, the streaks, blotches and other artifacts are identified using known image processing techniques and are automatically deleted from the scanned image data, with appropriate adjustment of the pixel values to blend in with the surrounding pixels as needed. Such methods are suboptimal for certain applications where accuracy and quality assurance are required. These known conventional methods have not provided a convenient method for correcting errors resulting from the automated artifact removal operation. In particular, these methods can result in: (i) original image information being erroneously identified as an artifact and deleted; and, (ii) original image artifacts being erroneously identified as information and maintained in the data. These system have not provided a quality assurance method that allows a user to correct such errors easily. Also, known systems do not preserve the removed artifacts for authentication purposes and/or reversal of the artifact removal process, if needed.
In light of the deficiencies associated with known artifact removal methods, an artifact removal and quality assurance system and method for scanned images are presented herein.